


Forgotten Magic

by freyjawriter24



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Gen, I'm Sorry, Loss, Loss of Parent(s), Muggleborns, Squibs, forgetting how to use magic, just lots of sadness and death, not believing in magic, refusing to use magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-18 04:55:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16988436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freyjawriter24/pseuds/freyjawriter24
Summary: I had an idea for a grandmother whose child never believed in Hogwarts and was never magical themselves, and thought about how unbelievably happy and relieved she'd be when it turned out her grandchild was magical too.There's lots of death and sadness and stuff before that happens, though, so maybe don't read it if you don't want to deal with any of that right now.





	Forgotten Magic

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to tell this story entirely without dialogue, so apologies that's not your cup of tea.
> 
> I also decided to not use any names in this story (which was both a tough challenge, because I find I use them quite a lot, but also a slight relief, as I usually spend hours researching and choosing names). Again, sorry if you think this makes it confusing or irritating.

Her time at Hogwarts had been magical, but when she left she wasn’t quite sure what she should do. There was the Ministry, of course, and all the shops in Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, but she didn’t know enough about any of those. She didn’t know enough about any one subject to research it further, she didn’t know enough in general to become a teacher, and she didn’t want to do anything she didn’t know enough about. But she knew farming, and she knew her family, so she went home.

Her parents knew everything about her, of course, but they didn’t like talking about it too much. They were more than happy to let the whole thing lie unspoken, to let things get back to _normal_ , to pretend she’d never left.

They looked the other way when she summoned objects to her rather than get up for them or ask for them to be passed to her. They pretended not to notice when the fire was lit at a distance, when logs levitated into the flames to keep it burning. They were pleased to have an extra pair of hands for the morning milking, and she always did that by hand.

And yet, she found someone like her. He was a low-down Ministry official, in the muggle department, and he’d been sent into the village because there’d been reports of some disruption to do with a magically-altered bicycle. She’d been at the shop at the time, picking up some tea and sugar, and she’d recognised the way his clothes didn’t quite look right, the way his hand was always pressed to his pocket, the way he scanned the world like he was trying to find something out of place. They never did find the bicycle.

They courted for two years, then married in the Spring, as soon as lambing season was over. His parents were already buried, his extended family non-existent, so the service was a small, quiet one. Her parents smiled with closed mouths and tight lips, and helped them set up their own little cottage on the other side of the village.

He apparated to work every morning from behind the oak tree in the back garden, and she set about sorting out the hens before going back to the farm where she grew up. Her parents were getting older now and needed her help more than ever. The washing up was done without the soap suds ever touching her hands, but other than that her magic stayed hidden.

It was years before she became pregnant. She’d wanted a child from day one, but they’d waited and waited and waited, getting more and more desperate and hopeless. She found out two weeks before her father died, and forever regretted choosing to wait to tell her parents. Now he’d never know.

Her mother sold the farm and moved into the rooms above the shop in the village, where her daughter got a job. The muggle woman spent all day knitting blankets and clothes for her expected grandchild, coming over for hours at a time to tend the chickens and talk to her daughter about how it was when she was pregnant. She nodded curtly to her son-in-law whenever he appeared with a crack from the garden at the end of the working day, and she would head home shortly afterwards.

The child was born in the winter, in the middle of a deathly cold night. The village doctor had trekked through the snow to get there, and her mother was there too, so her husband couldn’t use magic to banish the drafts or fetch clean blankets. But everything went smoothly, and the baby cried, and her mother wept in happiness, and even without real magic, the whole house felt like it was lit up with enchantments.

A year later her mother was gone too, a creeping sickness taking her in the night. She rocked the baby to sleep and cried silently, wishing she could have spent more time with her. Her husband took a week off from work to comfort her and help out with the growing child.

The baby grew, began to chatter away in nonsense, began to find real words amidst the mess of sounds, began to wriggle, then crawl, then walk.

Aged three they told him the stories of their childhood – the fairy stories her parents had told her, the bard stories his parents had told him.

Aged four they told him the stories of their own childhoods – years spent roving ancient walls, the paintings that you could talk to, the ghosts that you could ask for advice. They decided to home-school him, while the muggle children started to be sent to the nearest primary school.

Aged five he began to make up his own stories, imagining himself in the kitchens with the house elves, learning how to turn small rodents into inanimate objects and vice versa, flying on a broomstick high above the castle turrets.

Aged six his father died. A Ministry official she didn’t know came to the door, told her the news, explained that her husband wouldn’t be coming home. Their son listened from behind the bannisters upstairs, listened to his mother burst into tears in front of a complete stranger, and he cried silently. He wondered why magic couldn’t bring his father back. He wondered whether there had ever really been any magic at all.

She put her wand away, finally, after that. She had always done the milking by hand, had always hidden her magical nature at work on the farm and in the village, so she might as well get used to getting soap suds on her hands too. All the magic had gone out of her life when he died – what was the use in making it artificially?

She refused to acknowledge that the levels of magic in the house never increased. The years ticked by – seven, eight, nine, ten – and yet still nothing had happened in her son’s hands. She still told him tales of Hogwarts every night, but she could see the light of wonder behind his eyes was no longer there. No matter how much he played along, she knew the truth. He didn’t believe her anymore.

He turned eleven, and no owl came with a letter to their magic-empty house. In the last weeks of August, she wrote a letter and travelled down to London to find an owl to send it for her. The reply came the day before the train was due to leave – _No. I’m sorry._

She never said the word ‘squib’ in front of her son. He never realised or understood what he was. He grew older, was finally sent to the secondary school out of town, and he believed her stories were just that – stories. He forgot the details of the four houses, forgot his excitement for learning about goblin wars and how to care for mandrakes, forgot he’d once squealed with excitement whenever his father made his wand spew sparks on Bonfire Night.

Sometimes, she insisted on talking to him about his father, about the things she used to get up to at that amazing school, about the magic that she used to remember how to wield. But her stories always turned into arguments, as her son told her to stop lying and she begged him to remember how his father used to vanish behind the oak tree rather than walking or cycling to work. He refused to listen, and she cried, and she vowed, again, to never more use magic.

She continued to work at the shop, and he grew up and moved away. He had a life, a family, and she became only a fraction of it. Her grandchild was brought round for visits on birthdays, at Easter and Christmas, but otherwise she was left alone. She fed the chickens and collected their eggs, and her wand remained buried under old robes at the back of the attic.

The car crash shocked everyone. Suddenly her house was full, the little girl crying and the girl's mother’s various relatives coming over every weekend to check that she was ok. She looked up at her grandmother with heavy eyes, and the woman held her close and wished she could magic her something to take the pain away. But the wand was still upstairs and hadn’t been used in years, so she made some hot chocolate and told her bard stories until she fell asleep.

The chickens were the first to realise something strange was happening. Their seeds seemed to sprout roots and leaves almost as soon as they were thrown into their pen, so they learned to gobble them up even faster before they became inedible.

The girl’s new school friends never noticed, each far more interested in her strange fairy stories than whether or not her broken pencils seemed to mend themselves in her school bag.

Even her grandmother didn’t realise, not until she opened the curtains one morning to see an owl sat on the fence post. She stared, then shook her head, then stared again. It watched her through the window, head tilting at her, waiting patiently for her to come outside.

The letter was addressed to her grandchild. It was a Sunday, so the little girl didn’t have school, so she called her down and gave her the letter, silently. She watched the child’s face, silently pleading that this wasn’t all just a dream. The girl read quickly and curiously. She scanned the page twice, her eyes switching between confusion and awe, before finally looking up at the old woman and asking her the question – _Is it true?_

She was saved from an answer by a knock at the door. A witch in emerald robes, younger than the grandmother but far older than the grandchild, stood there with a large hat on, every inch the headmistress she would much later become.

Though she was excellent at hiding her own emotions, the professor was also adept at dealing with those of others. She explained everything to the little girl with her endless questions, producing sparks with her wand and making the armchair lift off the ground in proof. She looked at the older woman, and she understood something of the gaping mouth and the tears in each corner of her eyes.

The professor smiled slightly, and asked the child to go into the attic and find a long, thin box that was probably hidden somewhere in the back. By the time she returned, her grandmother’s wand box in her hands, she would never have known that the old witch had been sobbing in her new teacher’s arms for the past ten minutes.

The relief was clear in her face, though, and she could now at least hold herself together enough to tell the little girl about her own school days and all she would now have to look forward to.

Her magic was old, unused for years, and yet she remembered some of the spells she had learnt, all that time ago. She sent sparks dancing around the house, and lit the fire without touching it, and imagined finally being able to wash the dishes again without getting soap suds on her hands. Her granddaughter looked on in amazement, and wondered silently why she’d never seen her do any of this before.

That September the little girl, now eleven, was whisked off to school on a huge red train that travelled from a platform hidden in a wall, a place the old witch hadn’t been to in decades. She promised to write at least every week, stroking the feathers of her beautiful new barn owl, and she reminded her grandmother to practice the list of spells that the professor had given her to warm her back up to magic.

The grandmother cried for a million emotions – happiness, loss, relief, nervousness, nostalgia, grief, hope, jealousy, second-hand excitement, loneliness, anticipation, fear, pleasure. She bundled them all up into the biggest hug she could and sent her grandchild, her brilliant, magical grandchild, away to that world of mystery and wonder, and stayed put on the platform of a station in the centre of a mostly-muggle city.

The letters came thick and fast, about enchanted ceilings and blue and bronze robes and towers and paintings and lessons and ghosts. She drank in every one of them, and practiced her summoning by putting the letters on a table on the other side of the room and calling them to her. When a different owl visited, this one tawny and huge, she knew it would be from the woman who had held her while she sobbed, and every reply she sent contained a note of thanks that ran deeper than that for the list of practice exercises she had received.

The professor set her up with pen pals, other elderly magical folk that lived in far-flung places and had never learned to apparate. They met every few months in London, travelling the cumulative days by train and bus and car, and they relived their days at Hogwarts through their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they hugged each other in fondness and relief, and they shared together their new leases of life.

And when that little girl grew up and finished school, her grandmother, newly reborn into a smiling, life-filled witch, demanded that she never leave the magical world behind and always remember to tell her children true bedtime stories, with proof. And the young woman settled down with a job making potions to send to far-flung places where the magical residents didn’t know how to apparate and they didn’t trust the Knight Bus to get them where they were going.

And though she married a muggle, she never forgot her magical heritage, and her one magical child and one squib always knew the truth, and they would regularly visit their great-grandmother in her plot by the church, and tell her bard stories and fairy stories and what role in the Ministry they wanted when they grew up. And though there wasn’t magic in all of them, there was always magic in that house, and memories, and laughter, and no-one ever said that Hogwarts wasn’t real.


End file.
